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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

PRESENTED BY ' 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



In Mmtxkm 



TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF 



WILLIAM CZAR BRADLEY, 



Of Westminster, Vt. 



W h O died March 3d, 1807. 



By F. FROTHINGHAM. 



A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT THE UNITARIAN CHURCH, BRATTLEBORO, VT. 



SUNDAY, MARCH 10th, 1867. 



/ 
BRATTLEBORO : 

F. D. COBLEIGH, PRINTER, PHCENIX OFFICE. 
1867. 



l/ 



SERMON 



His eve was not dim. nor bis natural force abated. — Deut. 
XXXIV:!. 

We have during the past week committed to the dust the 
mortal part of a remarkable man. Remarkable he was in many- 
ways ; in the power of his presence and the bulk of his brain ; 
in the vast sweep and the wonderful command of his informa- 
tion and the hunger for knowledge which no years nor weak- 
ness could still ; in the independence of his thought and his ten- 
dency to superstition ; in the ringing vigor of his voice and the 
wealth of fun, wit, story, history, thought and wisdom it con- 
veyed ; in the versatility and power of his mind and the posi- 
tion and service as a public man to which he was called ; in the 
place he filled in the regard of his fellow citizens and the gap 
he leaves behind in many hearts at almost eighty-five ; in what 
he did and what he did not do ; in what he was and what he 
was not. Not the least remarkable is the almost literal appli- 
cableness of the text to him. So much was his weakness 
stronger than other men's strength, so much more was he in the 
evening of his days than the rest of us in life's high noon ; so 
robust and vivid was his life even to the last, that he seemed 
rather "Jo abdicate than be driven from his throne. We felt 
that "nis eye was not dim nor his natural force abated." Only 
four days before his death he said, after a visit from the doctor 
in which he had neither spoken nor seemed to heed what was 



passing: u He don't like the looks of things with me." The 
keen eye, to appearance dim, was alert still, reading what it 
wished to know. 

He has gone *'in a good old age, an old man and full of years.'" 
The beautiful old maxim bids us speak nothing save good of 
the dead. This may be. understood to mean Praise the dead as 
though they had no fault ; or Eulogize their virtues, hiding 
their faults. Both of which dishoner the dead, corrupt the liv- 
ing and degrade a noble maxim into a pander to sin. A truer 
understanding of it is If you cannot speak well of the dead say 
nothing. But the noblest I take to be that which, presenting 
both the lights and shadows of character, interprets a man's life 
in the light of that ^ood which he wished and aimed to reach. 
This I suppose to be the true point of view from which to judge 
any man; the only point from which we should be willing or 
consider it just to be judged. Judge any man — I care not who 
he be — by the light of his deeds, apart from his purpose and his 
aims, and there is none who will not be condemned as a miser- 
able sinner — the best, even the great apostle, as the worst, 
"the chief of sinners." Judge even those whose lives we can- 
not approve by the standard I have suggested, and how tem- 
pered will often be our severity and how cheerful our confi- 
dence in the triumph hereafter of a rectitude which often fought 
but failed to conquer here, and into what a kindlier relation we 
shall be led towards many of the living whom now we are quick 
to condemn. Could I, speaking in this spirit, describe him 
who has gone exactly as he seemed to me, certainly the most 
picturesque man I ever knew, and who leaves on my memory 
a picture whose charm I know not how to tell, I should do a 
service to myself and to you. 

I should not paint him as either a hero or saint ; though he 
could be the one, and, if I mistake not, there are saints in the 
calendar whose names in the judgment will pale by the side of 
his. He did not seem to me to aim at being either. From all 
that I have been able to gather he seems to me to have had a 
lowlier aim — viz: to live well. A little poem written in his 
later years gives the key to his purpose. It is called 



Dawn, Noon, Midnight. 

Imprisoned in a living jail, 

A lusty, kicking son of earth, 
Ready to wake, and weep, and wail, 

My limbs are struggling to the birth, 
Let me pass. 

Now on my feet I faltering stand, 

Till by enticements bolder grown, 
I quit the watchful mother's hand, 

And lo ! I learn to go alone. 
Let me pass. 

Now in youth's buoyant, merry round, 

With quickened pulse my steps advance 
Where music, wine, and wit abound, 

And blooming beauty leads the dance. 
Let me pass. 

Now blest with children, wife and friends, 

Ambition urging to the van, 
I strive to walk where duty leads, 

With love of God, good will to man. 
Let me pass. 

And now my better home draws nigh ; 

Free from presumption and despair, 
But weaty, faint, I wait to die, 

And leave this world and all its care. 
Let me pass. 

To live well, I say ; not above but among his neighbors — to 
live honestly, worthily, handsomely — so that they should not 
be ashamed of him, nor his country the worse, but the better 
for his living. I do not find that he pretended to anything 
more than this modest claim. His first youthful interpretation 
of it was the mistaken one which many young men make of 
confounding pleasure with good living. Coming into the world 
with an extraordinary amount of physical and mental vitality, 
tin ding a vast fund of enjoyment of various sorts before him, 
which he w T as peculiarly fitted to appreciate and enlarge, the 
temptation to it was great. But it did not hold him long. 
He flew only near enough to the deceitful flame to feel its heat, 
not near enough to burn his wings. Soon laying this early er- 
ror aside he abandoned it forever. Amid the temptations of a 
time and a career full of inducements and opportunities to ex- 
cess, he held the rudder of his self control and was master of 
his craft throughout the perilous voyage of his life. 



He was born at Westminster in this State, March 23d, 1782. 
Entering life at the close of our first Revolution he died soon 
after the close of the second He was wont to say that he was 
born in the year of the peace and had lived all his life in war. 
Yet when he passed away a new year of peace had come. He 
was a precocious boy. So rapidly did he learn that he not on- 
ly entered college at thirteen or fourteen, but was considered 
over-fitted. He did not stay there long, but was expelled dur- 
ing his freshman year. His Alma Mater — a severe mother to 
him — did what she might to atone for her harshness, by send- 
ing him afterwards a Master of Arts degree ; whether more to 
her honor than his let Yale herself decide. His father, sorely 
displeased at his disgrace, gave him a dungfork and set him to 
work at the manure-heap. The brave, sturdy boy did not des- 
pise his tool, but used it well, redeeming and biding his time. 
But other heaps were for his turning over and other fields for 
him to till. He soon resolved to study law. But he would be 
no mere lawyer. He would be the learned man which the col- 
lege refused to make him. Soon he was deep in the classics 
again. His home position galling him, he quitted it and went 
to Amherst, Mass, where he studied awhile with Judge Stephen 
Strong, and thence to Blanford, Mass., where he continued his 
legal studies with Mr. Ashmun, until his father took him home 
again, where he completed his studies. So rapid was his pro- 
gress that at twenty he was admitted to the bar (1802). Re- 
fused permission to practice in the Supreme Court on account 
of his youth, he had yet won so great respect and admiration 
by his talents, acquirements and character, that the Legislature 
appointed him Attorney for Windham County, and thus se- 
cured his access to the Supreme Court, He held this office for 
seven years. At twenty-four he became Representative to the 
State Legislature ; at thirty a member of the State Council — 
which corresponds nearly to the present Senate ; and at thirty- 
one Representative to Congress. Here he served one term dur- 
ing the last war with Great Britain, of which he was an advo- 
cate (1813—15) ; and two years after the close of which he was 
appointed agent of the United States under the treaty of Ghent 



for fixing the North Eastern boundary. In this work, which 
lasted five years, he did what he esteemed the great public ser- 
vice of his life. Through the wild region of the North East 
frontier he went in person and laid down the line ; which, re- 
jected by Great Britain and disputed over with an acrimony 
that wxll nigh ended in war, he had the satisfaction of seeing 
adopted in the Ashburton treaty. This ended, he was sent 
again to Congress for two terms (1823 — 27). Here his public 
career substantially closed at forty-five ; though at sixty-eight 
(1850), we find him again in the Legislature of Vermont, at 
seventy-four Presidential Elector, throwing the vote of our State 
for John C. Freemont (1856), and in the following year a mem- 
ber of the State Constitutional Convention. 

During the most of his public career he was a Democrat, in 
the days when that word meant friend of the Republic and of 
the rights of man. The slavery question had not reached the 
portentous bigness that it afterwards assumed. It appeard on- 
ly in disguise, in which it might readily mislead honest and lib- 
erty loving men. The only record I have found of his contact 
with it while in Congress, tells of his advocating a resolution of 
inquiry "whether there was in force" in the District of Colum- 
bia a law authorizing " the imprisonment of any free man of 
color, being a citizen of any of the United States, and his sale, 
as an unclaimed slave, for jail fees and other charges ; and if 
so, to inquire into the expediency of repealing the same. " 
Where he really stood in relation to it is shown by his joining 
the Free Soil party in 1848. In so doing he but carried out his 
life-long principles. They, with whom he had acted, forsook 
them. They left him, therefore, and he was of them no more. 
He clung to the thing he had always revered. In the trial 
hour it blossomed into Universal Liberty. The name by which 
he rightly called it they followed, although cunning men had 
baptized it into the spirit of Slavery. He kept the reality of 
consistency — they its shadow. He lived in the days of men 
whom it is the fashion to think the great men of the Republic. 
Born the same year as Webster, Calhoun, Benton and Cass, — 
whose acquaintance and respect, with that of Adams, Clay and 



others of less note, he enjoyed, he seems to me, though winning 
no such couspicuous fame to hold a position of more real great- 
ness than the three most famous of them. He was too wise to 
make the "American system." It was uot in him to speak 
words so false to Humanity as the 7th of March speech. He 
would have died sooner than destroy his country for Slavery's 
sake. And in saying this I claim for him no extraordinary or 
exceptional greatness. He made no pretence to being a Re- 
former. He set up as advocate of no original and startling 
theories. He raised no quixotic standard of political or person- 
al morals. He held to the attainment of practical ends. He 
was emphatically of the people. So far was he from "extreme 
views,"' so called, as to think the suffrage a privilege, not a right. 
He did not even rise to what I suppose the true, certainly the 
comprehensive, view, that it is both. I suppose it was his pride 
and J03' to represent what may be called the advanced average 
thought of the people. In this respect he was like Mr. Lincoln. 
Perhaps it was one secret of the people's love for him. Though 
on their better side he kept within their reach. 

On quitting public life he devoted himself assiduousl}' to the 
practice of his beloved profession. It received no dishonor 
from him. He soon rose to eminence in it and became known 
and prized as the first lawyer in the State. The highest hon- 
ors which his profession had to bestow he could command. But 
his increasing deafness laid limitations on him not to be broken 
through. I have been told that no man would ever go on with 
a suit if he advised against it. And no man can know how of- 
ten he used the opportunities open to every lawyer to heal di- 
visions and reconcile enmities — becoming, as no one had a bet- 
ter chance to, even to his own pecuniary loss, a peace-maker in- 
deed. But such was the quality of the man, such his respect 
for his noble profession and for himself, that we may easily be- 
lieve this was often the case. 

But lawyer alone, even though in a broad and eminent sense, 
he would not be. His sympathies were too large and his activ- 
ity too great for that. He loved books and men. He swept 
through the domain of literature with the march of a conquer- 



or. The Greek and Latin classics were minutely at his com- 
mand. In his old age he was delighted at finding a copy of 
Grotins in possession of a friend. But it was in Latin. It 
made no difference to him. He borrowed and read it through. 
With the Scriptures he was far better acquainted, in the origi- 
nal tongues and in the history and criticism of their text, than 
most ministers. Philosophy, history, poetry, or practical sci- 
ence, nothing worth study came amiss to him. He delighted 
to discuss or converse with the best minds on all living subjects. 
Nothing pleased him more than to gather around him those 
with whom he could. He was less particular about their garb 
or their station than about them. He seemed a living encyclo- 
paedia. No subject came up to which he could not contribute 
something worth hearing. 

In keeping with this he was distinguished for his hospitality. 
In this he was seconded by his wife, to whom married while he 
was but twenty, he paid during more than sixty happy years, 
devoted and tender reverence. The latch-string truly hung out- 
side their door. Strangers from abroad, and friends from far 
and near found welcome there. The wealth and prodigality of 
his conversation afforded a mental hospitality even more gene- 
rous and attractive than that of his unselfish home. All clas- 
ses of society partook of it and all classes paid for it in admira- 
tion and regard. 

It may surprise some, sharing the present mania for leaAung 
home, which works so much harm to our country towns, that so 
able a man was willing to spend his life in his native village. 
This seems to me worthy special praise. To stay at home, 
where he is well known, and live down the suspicions and mis- 
trusts created by early excesses ; to stay at home and .compel 
the affection, confidence and honor which even a prophet is not 
apt to have in his own country ; to stay at home and in face of 
seemingly over-mastering difficulties to make noble eminence 
out of nothing. I think there is something great and brave, 
and beautiful in that. Compare it with going away and hiding 
your early vice behind other men's ignorance : with going away 
and winning a name among those Avho know nothing about 



10 

your past; with going away where you shall have the best 
chance to succeed, regardless whether a home is deserted, 
whether parents needing your presence are left behind to grow 
old alone, and perhaps brothers and sisters to whom you might 
be a protector and a comfort mourn your absence, and whether 
the birth-place which bore you lose its honor which you give to 
strangers. I do not forget the advantages of going. Some- 
times it is best ; sometimes needful. But still I say he does the 
handsome, and the great, the gentle and the filial thing who 
sticks to his home and makes more of it than it was before. 
How many fair young lives, which have come to grief in the 
spider net of a great city, had been saved to their country and 
their dear ones, could some voice have whispered to them how- 
much nobler things they could have done at home. Surely 
Vermont, aye Westminster, had been honored and advanced 
by the filial loyalty and love of this true son. 

Another point which may surprise some is that he did not 
amass riches. He had something better to do. Like Agassiz 
he could not afford to lay up money. His sympathies and 
tastes were too large and hospitable for that. He could not 
pinch his mind and sear his heart for gold. He could not bend 
his back to so cheap and profitless a burden. He would not 
stoop to dishonorable ways of gaming it. His money he turn- 
ed into prompt wealth by making others share its benefit. Gen- 
erosity and honor, not avarice and cunning, were the stamp he 
put on every coin that crossed his palm. Now he has gone, 
Avould it have added to his fame to know that he had left half 
a million dollars behind ? I trow that the man, in his simple 
manhood, with the glory of his beautiful old age around him, 
is a fairer sight without the gold. 

His old age, how beautiful it was ! How large in charity, 
how sweet in tenderness, how cheerful in hope, how calm in 
trust, how healthy in outlook. Old age is life's glory or its 
shame. Hard, cold, querulous, cynical, it shows life's failure. 
Tender, warm, kindly and believing, it testifies to life's success. 
During our country's deadly struggle he bated not faith in the 
triumph of the right when younger hearts sank well nigh in 
despair. He never lost interest in books or passing events un- 






11 

til repeated bereavements removed the props on which his heart 
chiefly leaned. His talk was marvellously rich and varied. 
Alas ! that so much of it like milk spilled on the ground, can- 
not be gathered up again. Who that once saw his glad, bright 
smile, a very sunshine, can ever forget it? His whims and 
superstitions — for strange as it may seem, this strong man was 
careful to kill the first snake he met in the spring-time, to pay 
no money on Monday, and to see the new moon over his right 
shoulder — his whims and superstitions sate so lightly on him 
that they were not discerned as blemishes. He wore them 
frankly — this brave old man. There was no mean streak in 
him. He wore his worst side out. Some thought him lax and 
unbelieving. How little they knew of the breadth and depth 
of his vision and his piety! Free in his thinking he certainly 
was. A mind so truth-seeking could not be otherwise. But 
when, speaking of his almost life-long physicial infirmity, which 
had deprived him of so much, he said it had been a blessing to 
him, securing to him people's best thoughts only, saving him 
from a vast deal of chaff, and compelling him to reliance on 
himself, shall we say there was no quiet faith in him and reve- 
rence 1 ? Asked what he thought of Christ, he replied: "What 
Peter answered to Jesus when asked Who do men say that I 
am 1 The son of man ? And Peter answered and said Thou 
art the Christ, the son of the living God. That is my faith," 
he said. An old minister, anxious about his condition, inquired 
of him shortly before his death as to his views. The old man 
made this beautiful reply : "As I grow older nry faith grows 
simpler. I come more and more to the simple truth of salva- 
tion by Christ." He had no fears in looking out on the future. 
Called on one da}^ by two friends, one a deacon, he replied to 
the other who said " You have had many mercies during your 
life:" "Yes, God has been very good tome. I do not be- 
lieve that He is going to roast me on His gridiron hereafter ; " 
and he playfully added, pointing to the deacon, " I don't be- 
lieve he thinks so either." In this cheerful faith he awaited, 
longed for death. And when it came, as God's gifts come to 
his beloved, "in sleep," he passed to the everlasting waking. 
None needed to close his eyes, for from that sleep they woke no 
more. 



12 

Friends, are there not some worthy lessons which this life, 
now gone, speaks to us? Let us heed them, taking to heart 
the warning and the faith conveyed in this poem which he 
wrote : 

As at midnight I was reading by my lamp's fitful gleam. 

I fell into a slumber, and lo ! I dreamed a dream : 

This outer world had undergone a great and sudden change, 

And everything around me seemed wondrous new and strange. 

No sunlight,. no moonlight, no starlight glittered there! 
A mild and shady twilight seemed to permeate the sir ; 
And there sate the blessed Jesus. No golden throne had he, 
But was elad in simple majesty, as erst in Galilee. 

Behind him, Justice, Mercy, Truth, safe guides in earthly things. 
Their functions now absorbed in him, all stood with folded wings ; 
And the Recording Angel, with deeply sorrowing look, 
Took m his hands and opened the all-containing Book. 

There came a distant murmur, as of waves upon the shore. 
While throngs on throngs unnumbered into the Presence pour : 
By their instincts segregated here, nigh the close of time. 
Rush the bad of every nation, of every age and clime. 

They stop astonished, all abashed, and with attentive ear. 
Tho' the angel's lips were moving, no accents could I hear. 
Yet of that startled multitude to each like lightning came. 
His life's continuous story, its mingled guilt and shame. 

From all the secrets there disclosed, oh! who could lift the veil ? 
Or of the varied shades of wrong unfold the dreadful tale 
Of kingly pride, plebeian spite, of violated trust, 
Of mustering force, of hidden sin, cruelty and lust ? 

Each has his due allotment, — and with agony of heart 

The vast assemblage vanished at, the thrilling wdrd " Depart! " 

There was no driving angel, and no extraneous force. 

For conscience was accuser, and the punisher, Remorse. 

When this I saw transacted, upon my face I fell ; 

The anguish of that moment no human tongue can tell : 

With throat convulsed and choking, I gasped, and strove to cry, 

"Have mercy, Lord ! Oh mercy have ! a sinner lost am I ! ; ' 

To look upon that face again, how was it I should dare ? 
And yet I wildly ventured with the courage of despair : 
When that pitying eye fell on me, beaming mercy from above, 
And I saw that smile ineffable of never dying love. 

By so sudden a transition all stupefied I gazed, 
Then in my members trembling, rose bewildered and amazed. 
But the kindest words of comfort the blessed Master spoke, 
Which wrapped my soul in ecstasy, and sobbing I awoke. 
Brattleboro, March !), 1867. 



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